At 8:02 P.M. TWA Flight 800 left Gate 27 at JFK bound for Paris, with 230 passengers and crew members aboard. Just after 8:18 P.M., the 747-100 lifted off from Runway 22-R. Heading east along the south shore of Long Island, the plane leveled off at just over 13,000 feet. Then, at 8:31:12 P.M., something in the area of the center fuel tank set off an explosion so catastrophic that a gaping hole was blown in the bottom of the fuselage. The forward section of the jumbo jet was ripped open. The aircraft was torn apart and instantly disappeared from radar screens. Within seconds, everyone aboard was dead.1
By midnight, James Kallstrom, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York office, had marshaled one hundred agents into action. By week’s end, another two hundred had joined them. The immediate suspicion among federal investigators was that TWA 800 had been downed by an act of terror—a bomb or a missile.2 The missile theory gained ground after eyewitnesses reported seeing an object approaching the plane, followed by a white light and what seemed like a second explosion. Soon conspiracy theorists were alleging that the missile had come from a test being conducted at the time by the U.S. Navy.3 But six months later, when assembled parts of the aircraft proved that nothing had pierced the fuselage from outside, Kallstrom still couldn’t rule out a bomb.4
The mystery deepened when FBI analysts, combing the wreckage dredged from the ocean floor, found traces of the high explosives PETN, RDX, and nitroglycerine throughout the 747. Two of the chemicals were detected in the carpeting along the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth rows, adjacent to the center fuel tank.5
Whatever the cause, the tragic crash sent shock waves through the judge’s chambers at the Foley Square courthouse where the Bojinka trial was under way.
After six weeks of testimony, the jurors had heard witness after witness describe how Yousef had built a bomb using nitroglycerine and placed it under a seat in the twenty-sixth row of a 747. They listened to prosecutors describe how Yousef, Murad, Shah, and a fourth coconspirator plotted to plant similar devices aboard 747s and other jumbo jets— undetectable bombs with Casio timers designed to blow the planes apart over water. They’d listened as a PAL flight steward described Haruki Ikegami’s body after he “fell into the hole” created by the blast, which occurred in the same area on PAL Flight 434 as the point of detonation aboard TWA Flight 800.6
To some agents at 26 Federal Plaza, TWA Flight 800 appeared to be Bojinka fulfilled. And in the hours after the crash, Yousef, Sheikh Rahman, and Osama bin Laden became the FBI’s three prime suspects.7 Was it possible that the bomb maker’s uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed—the fourth Bojinka conspirator, still at large—had somehow arranged for a Casio-nitrocellulose device to be planted onboard the Paris-bound flight?
The circumstantial connection was even more curious given what was going on in federal court. On the very morning after TWA Flight 800 exploded, the Bojinka trial jurors were due to hear the tape of a confession made by Abdul Hakim Murad at Camp Crame on January 7, 1995. During that interrogation, he specifically described how the Casio-nitro bombs would be placed. He even discussed how, after Bojinka, Yousef intended to export his deadly technology to other terrorists in Egypt, Algeria, and France.
Now, on the morning after the crash, whether the incident had been an accident or an act of terror, Yousef’s lawyer, Roy Kulcsar, appeared in front of Judge Duffy and complained about “the unfortunate confluence of circumstances.” He noted that “the transcript” of Murad’s interrogation contained “references to Paris.”8
The jurors had not been sequestered, and Shah’s lawyer, David Greenfield, argued that “Whatever [TV] station anybody was watching last night, they know what happened. They know a plane exploded.”
“My concern, Your Honor,” said Kulcsar, “is that right now whatever general information [the jurors] have…we will be faced shortly within the next hour or so with a statement attributed to one of the defendants specifically dealing with the very issue of explosions on airliners.”
There was some discussion among Judge Duffy and the other lawyers over whether the word Paris should be excised from Murad’s interrogation transcript. Clearly Murad had made the reference in 1995 in the context of plans to teach jihadis in other countries; it had no bearing on this specific flight bound for Paris. But Judge Duffy put off making a decision on whether to entertain a mistrial motion. He decided to press on, and began by admonishing the jury.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Last night near Moriches Inlet out in Long Island an airplane blew up, TWA Flight 800. Now there is going to be…all kinds of speculation about what happened. I have no clue what happened, nor do you, nor do any of the people who have been speculating up to this point. All we know is that there was an explosion and the airplane went down. It’s a tragedy, there is no two ways about it, but that had nothing to do with this case.”
However innocent they may have sounded, Duffy’s words amounted to a finding of fact. It was one thing for the judge to minimize the relevance of the Paris reference, but another thing entirely to declare that the TWA crash “had nothing to do” with the Bojinka case. After all, the FBI was just beginning to gather evidence on what caused the explosion; now, just hours after the disaster, the judge was preemptively declaring Yousef and his Bojinka codefendants innocent of any connection.
Later he admonished the jurors to avoid media coverage of the TWA Flight 800 story. Then, after polling each of them, and deciding that none had been prejudiced, he ruled that the Feds could continue the case.
It was the role of the National Transportation Safety Board to determine the cause of the crash. It was the job of the FBI to investigate whether an act of terror had brought down TWA Flight 800. If the Bureau concluded that a bomb had been placed onboard, the NTSB would have had its answer. But as the weeks went by, the FBI was unable to establish definitive proof of a crime.
Eventually, after a sixteen-month investigation, the NTSB reached the conclusion that an electrical short in the area of the center fuel tank had ignited jet fuel vapors. It was a finding that would be debated for years to come.9 Like the “single bullet theory” proposed to explain Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman in the JFK assassination, the fuel tank ignition spark theory was arrived at by the Safety Board in the absence of any other definitive explanation for the crash—short of detonation by an explosive device.10
Reluctant for months to embrace the NTSB’s mechanical theory, the FBI eventually fell into line with the Safety Board.
Unexplained High Explosive Residue
To explain the presence of RDX, PETN, and nitro aboard the wreckage, Bureau agents pointed to a test done on the aircraft by a bomb-sniffing dog in St. Louis five weeks before the crash. They accepted the theory that residue might have spilled from test explosives that a St. Louis airport cop had used to measure the K-9’s ability to locate bombs.
But that test didn’t explain the presence of RDX found on the curtain in Flight 800’s aft cargo bay, the fact that the door to that cargo area had never been found, or the evidence of spike-tooth tears in the aluminum skin adjacent to the door. Later, jurors in the Bojinka trial would hear testimony from Steven Burmeister of the FBI’s lab that chemicals examined from Yousef’s bomb factory in Room 603 had included methenane, which is used to make RDX.11
Kenneth Maxwell, the retired FBI supervisory special agent in charge who ran the Bureau’s TWA investigation on Long Island, said, in an interview for this book, that he was still concerned about a number of unanswered questions.
“The fact that RDX was found on the aft cargo bay curtain is still unexplainable,” he said, “and, to be honest, I wasn’t entirely satisfied. There are ten doors on a seven-four-seven. We recovered nine of them. You’re looking at high-explosive residue. Why do we find nine doors? Did that missing door experience more of a force? Was it blown out? There were quite a few of these spike-tooth injuries to the fuselage skin.”12
What that meant forensically wasn’t clear. Maxwell said that, at the time, the government didn’t have a comparative database to measure the impact of high explosives on an airplane’s skin. But if a blast did occur around the cargo hold, there was evidence suggesting which direction the force might have moved in. As Maxwell recalled, “Most of the spike-tooth tears were pushing out.”
Maxwell, who supervised the reconstruction of the aft cargo bay from the recovered debris, said that “there was no evidence of the fuselage being struck by any kind of projectile.” But he said that he was still troubled by the possibility that an explosion caused by terrorists might have downed the plane. “The circumstances of the crash,” said Maxwell, “the way that it came out of the sky—there was no notification from the crew to the Tower. Certainly the early signs pointed toward an act of terror.”
Once a missile was ruled out, Maxwell said, the decision by the FBI to embrace the mechanical theory came as the result of a ruling by William Tobin, the Bureau’s chief metallurgist.
“He maintained, based on his field analysis, that there was no indicia of high-explosive damage,” said Maxwell. “So that was the ruling authority and that was the way it went.” A source close to the investigation acknowledged that Maxwell and metallurgist Tobin were at odds.13
Tobin had reached his conclusion in the early weeks of the investigation. In late July, with only 10 percent of the wreckage recovered, the metallurgist declared that the cause was accidental and not a missile or a bomb. This led to an August face-off between Maxwell and Tobin at 26 Federal Plaza. Maxwell wanted more specific lab tests performed to determine definitively if an explosive device was involved. But Tobin reportedly declared, “If there was evidence of a bomb or a missile, we would have found it by now. We’re just wasting our time if we keep studying the wreckage.”14
“The metallurgist made up his mind early on in the case that it had to be an accident because he didn’t see any blatant metal evidence [of an explosion],” said Maxwell. “That was a struggle.”
But Tobin had thirty-five years with the Bureau and was highly regarded. In the end, his ruling was a definitive factor in the NTSB’s conclusion that the cause of the crash was mechanical.
The ruling still troubles Maxwell.
“To this day, as we speak,” said Maxwell, “if you read the NTSB report, no one has ever identified the ignition source. It certainly didn’t blow itself up. Yet despite all of this scrutiny—studying everything from static electricity to the wiring, to the electrical components of a fuel pump and more—no one could find a specific ignition source.”
Maxwell said that a suspicion Yousef’s cell might have been involved was “right up there on the board” at the FBI from day one of the investigation. He added that after thirty years in law enforcement he wouldn’t be surprised if there was a connection.
“I’m not saying for sure it was a crime or that Ramzi was related,” said the former SSAC. “But the thing that gnaws at me is the uncertainty— that we finished all of this investigation with this degree of uncertainty.”
Maxwell wasn’t the only one. James Kallstrom, the head of the FBI’s New York office, had suspected foul play in the crash almost immediately.15 Over the months of the investigation, as Maxwell supervised the assembly of 95 percent of the recovered aircraft in a hangar—situated, ironically, at Calverton, Long Island—Kallstrom too battled with NTSB investigators who seemed bent on finding a mechanical cause.16 But by 1997 the investigation had cost the government $20 million. At its height, seven hundred FBI agents were involved.17 Seven thousand interviews were conducted. More than three thousand leads were processed. All of this without any definitive evidence of a crime.
As the weeks went by, there was growing pressure within the Bureau to bring the probe to an end.
“We were hearing, ‘Hey, FBI, when is this over?’ ” said Maxwell. “You’re spending millions of dollars.” So finally I got the call [from Kall-strom], ‘Shut it down.’ It was a very direct order: ‘Shut it down.’ ”
Again, the question is why?
In 1997, after John O’Neill transferred from his post as chief of counterterrorism to special agent in charge of the National Security Division in the New York office, he became concerned that the TWA Flight 800 investigation was sapping crucial resources that might better be directed toward the war on terror. Supervisors at 26 Federal Plaza began to talk of “an exit strategy.” The word reportedly came down to Neal Herman, head of the Joint Terrorist Task Force, who had committed a number of his agents to the Flight 800 probe.
According to John Miller in his book The Cell, Herman’s reply to the request to end the investigation was “My God, what the hell is an exit strategy? We get out of cases when they’re over. Since when do we need a strategy to get out of them?”18
“O’Neill’s discussions with Kallstrom and with Washington and the NTSB were putting on a lot of pressure,” said Maxwell. So after sixteen months the FBI’s investigation into the downing of TWA Flight 800 came to a close.
In a press conference on November 18, 1997, Kallstrom declared that the FBI had found no evidence of high-explosive damage from either a missile or a bomb. The damage, he said, was “consistent with the over pressurization of the center fuel tank, the breakup of the aircraft, the fire, and the impact of the aircraft into the ocean.”
Kenneth Maxwell was one senior Bureau official who felt the decision was premature.
“I said, ‘Do you want me to walk away from this thing without covering every base? That’s not what we do for a living.’ But we closed up shop. Afterward I heard crazy comments, even inside the Bureau, like, ‘They wasted too much time on that [Flight 800] case. After all, it was an accident.’ ”
By early September 1996, the question of whether TWA Flight 800 had been a latent casualty of Bojinka became legally moot. After fourteen weeks of trial, the jury of eight men and four women found Ramzi Yousef guilty of planting the bomb that killed Haruki Ikegami aboard PAL Flight 434. Along with Murad and Shah, he was also convicted in the Bojinka plot to down eleven jumbo jets. As the guilty verdicts echoed through the courtroom, Yousef listened in an open-necked shirt and slacks rather than his customary lawyer’s suit.19 It almost seemed a sign that he was resigned to his fate. But after the verdict, Murad’s attorney complained that the crash of Flight 800 “had an impact on the jury” and was a key factor in the convictions.20
When JTTF head Neal Herman heard the Bojinka verdict, he was in the hangar at Calverton where the Flight 800 wreckage was still being assembled. FBI agent Frank Pellegrino reportedly called to say, “It’s over. We won.”
Now, in the light of 9/11, the question is, who really won? Accident or not, the crash was a strategic victory for the forces of al Qaeda. Some intelligence analysts now believe that the combined impact of the Oklahoma City and TWA Flight 800 investigations sapped Bureau resources to such a degree that there was little left for the war on terror.
“From 1995 until early in 1997 there was a lull in work on international terrorism at the FBI, and little interest in looking beyond the immediate actors in the terrorism cases related to Yousef and the blind Sheikh,” wrote Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, two former terrorism specialists who served on the National Security Council.
In their exceptional post-9/11 book The Age of Sacred Terror, Benjamin and Simon concluded that “the Bureau’s resources were stretched thin….Within the Bureau there was also an unwillingness to believethat there was more than met the eye. The feeling was that Yousef was a one off, a virtuoso freelancer who wanted to make his mark as the world’s greatest terrorist.”21
Coming on the night before a crucial tape on Bojinka was about to be entered at trial, was the crash of TWA Flight 800 merely a coincidence, or the perfection of Yousef’s plan? Was it a coldly calculated attempt to derail his trial at a time when it was turning against him? Was it a strategic ploy by al Qaeda to further distract the FBI from the war on terror? Was it all of the above?
Absent the discovery of that missing tenth cargo door, Kenneth Maxwell and others remain convinced that the true cause of the crash may never be known.